Comment
on Amy Knight’s review of Spies in the Times Literary
Supplement

by
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

[TLS
ran only a small portion of our response to Knight’s review,
declining to run the full text. Below is the full text.}

Amy Knight states in her 26 June
review of our book Spies:
the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America,
“the main purpose of Spies,
it seems is not to enlighten readers, but to silence those who still
voice doubts about the guilt of people like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter
White, I.F. Stone and others.” If being forced to
confront overwhelming evidence that these men cooperated with Soviet
intelligence is unnerving to Amy Knight, we would count our book a
success. We also note that most of the text of Spies
discusses other individuals who cooperated with Soviet intelligence,
particularly those in scientific and technical fields. We
devote less then ten percent of our text to what Knight claimed was
our “main purpose.”

The direct identification of
Hiss by his real name as a Soviet source in these KGB documents
inflamed Knight and sparked a most bizarre assertion. The
notebooks contain a December 1948 memo written by Anatoly Gorsky,
head of the KGB station in the United States in 1944 and 1945 and in
1948 a senior headquarters official of the Committee of Information
(the “KI” was a short-lived merger of the KGB with the
GRU, Soviet military intelligence), in which he assessed the possible
maximum damage done to Soviet intelligence by six defectors, listing
the Soviet intelligence officers and American sources known to them
and, thus, likely exposed to American security agencies. One of
the defectors was Whittaker Chambers and the list of those he was
thought to have exposed or could have exposed included Alger Hiss,
listed by his real name and by his cover name in 1948, “Leonard.”

This will not do for Knight.
First she insists that Vassiliev misdated the memo and that it is
part of a 1949 report. It isn’t. It is a
stand-alone document signed by Gorsky and dated December 1948 as any
review of the notebooks shows. There is no evidence that the
dating is incorrect. But why would Knight have preferred it if
the document had been dated 1949 rather than 1948? Because she
could then put forth a fantasy to explain away the identification of
Hiss. Gorsky, she claims without a speck of evidence, was
making it up, writing not on his knowledge and the records of the KI
but based on “information from reports by his agents who were
following closely the hearings of the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) and the Hiss case,” from 1948 and 1949.
The notion that a senior Soviet intelligence official got his
information about who was and who was not a Soviet source from
American newspaper reports of the Hiss trial or HUAC hearings rather
than the readily at hand records of Soviet intelligence services
boggles the mind. Moreover, why would Gorsky have written a
memo exaggerating the damage done to Soviet intelligence by adding to
the lists of those exposed by defectors the names of people who were
not, in fact, Soviet sources? It is difficult enough to be the
bearer of truthful bad news to one’s superiors, but to make up
bad news is an act of near bureaucratic suicide.

But there is more.
Although Knight conceals it from TLS
readers, two other senior KI officers, Petr Fedotov and Konstantin
Kukin, in a report (also dated December 1948) to the chairman of the
KI wrote about “our former agents who were betrayed by Chambers
(A. Hiss, D. Hiss, Wadleigh, Pigman, Reno).” Does anyone
really believe that three
senior Soviet intelligence officers in reports to their agency’s
chief identified Soviet agents from American newspaper stories rather
than agency records? Additionally another KGB memo, one from
1950, noted that the Soviet GRU agent “Leonard,”
identified as a senior American State Department official, had just
been convicted in an American trial. The only senior American
diplomat convicted of an espionage-related crime in 1950 was Alger
Hiss.

The evidence from myriad
sources—eyewitnesses and written documents, public testimony
and private correspondence, fellow spies and Soviet intelligence
officers, decrypted cables and long-closed archives—is
overwhelming and conclusive. Alger Hiss worked for the GRU in the
1930s and 1940s. The KGB hoped to use him in mid-1945. He was
identified in Soviet intelligence documents by his real name and
three different cover names, each of which is clearly and
demonstrably linked to him. KGB officers and American Communist Party
underground leaders knew him as a member of the Soviet apparatus.
Several of his fellow agents, including Noel Field, Hede Massing,
Charles Kramer, Victor Perlo, and Harold Glasser, identified him as
an agent in confidential communications that made their way back to
Moscow. And the Soviet intelligence agency’s own damage
assessments confirm that senior officials in Moscow knew that Alger
Hiss was an agent.

Knight’s mistakes and
misstatements do not end with her outlandish treatment of the Hiss
case. She claims that Soviet espionage “in terms of the
actual secrets Moscow reaped, was often unremarkable.” This
assertion is flatly wrong. For example, Soviet atomic espionage
was very successful, providing the Soviets with highly detailed
information on the construction of the pure uranium bomb and, more
importantly, the secret of the implosion trigger that allowed the
building of a plutonium bomb. The information from Klaus Fuchs,
Theodore Hall, Alan Nunn May, Engelbert Broda, Russell McNutt and
David Greenglass allowed the Soviets to construct a bomb much sooner
and at only a fraction of the investment in industrial resources than
would otherwise have been necessary.

Another Soviet spy, William
Weisband, disclosed to the USSR that the ultra-secret National
Security Agency was deciphering Soviet military logistics radio
traffic and was tracking the movement of Soviet military supplies in
real time. The Soviets promptly adopted more sophisticated
codes, and the United States lost this access and, consequently,
missed entirely the huge military supply effort in early 1950 that
supplied North Korea with the military means of invading the
South.

The harvest of high tech
military information by the espionage apparatus supervised by Julius
Rosenberg was also remarkable. Steve Usdin in an article in the
Summer 2009 issue of the Journal
of Cold War Studies has
identified the stolen military secrets to include the AN/CPQ
proximity fuse (one of America’s greatest military advantages),
the SCR-384 radar for locating aircraft, the AN/APS-2 radar for
locating surface ships, the AN/APS-12 fire-control radar, the
AN-CRT-4 sonobuoy, the Westinghouse 19A jet engine (America’s
first jet engine) and the plans for the P80 Shooting Start, the first
American combat jet. One could go on, but suffice to say that
Knight’s assessment of the information as “unremarkable”
is preposterous.

Knight strangely attempts to
separate the KGB from its Stalin-era past, referring to the
“agencies” that preceded the KGB. But the foreign
intelligence agency that was under the successive jurisdiction of the
Cheka, GPU, OGPU, GUGB, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, MVD, and KI — and that
became the First Main Directorate of the KGB — was really the
same agency under different names.. Knight scathingly denounces
us for even referring to the KGB. As we noted in the
introduction to the book (Knight appears to have missed this), we
stated that we would uniformly use the familiar “KGB”
rather than confuse readers by using these multiple acronyms to refer
to different incarnations of the same agency. Knight also
declares that these Stalin-era agencies were crippled at times by
Stalin’s purge of his security services and notes that most
station chief in the late 30s were recalled and shot. But what
Knight does not tell TLS
readers is that Spies
discusses in detail the recall and execution of the chiefs of the
American stations and many of their senior officers and the
subsequent crippling of Soviet intelligence in the United States from
late 1938 to mid-1941. Readers can judge for themselves the
ethics of appropriating information in a book under review,
presenting it as one’s own, and not telling readers that the
book in question covers the point in detail.

Knight opens her review by
likening Soviet espionage operations to a Coen brothers spy comedy
“Burn After Reading.” This serves her immediate
purpose of denigrating information in Spies
that she wishes not to hear, but TLS
readers should realize that the KGB was not a comic organization, its
practitioners were deadly serious, and while it had its share of
failures, it also had signal successes. A historian whose notion of
how espionage works in the real world is drawn from comic movies is
hardly a reliable guide to its practitioners.

Knight denounces Spies
for citing Soviet “spy-masters,” who claimed to produce
actual intelligence. First, the expression “spy-masters,”
despite Knight’s quotation marks, never occurs in our book.
It is Knight’s invention, to buttress her conceit that the
KGB’s officers never recruited real spies, but only “chased
after left-wingers and Communist sympathizers who had little useful
information to offer and often did not even realize that they were
the targets of Soviet intelligence.” Her charge is silly
and betrays ignorance of how the KGB handled recruitment and the
elaborate procedures designed to insure that officers did not invent
sources or exaggerate their information.

Knight states that we “were
apparently so eager to make use of the [Vassiliev’s] notebooks
that they neglected to ask Vassiliev some important questions.”
Not only did we question Vassiliev closely about the provenance of
the notebooks, but we also convened a private conference in
Washington in 2006 during which experienced historians, archivists,
and intelligence professionals examined the notebooks and questioned
Vassiliev directly about how they were prepared. These experts
unanimously agreed with our assessment that the material was
genuine. Further, in 2008 we distributed copies of the
notebooks to five espionage history specialists who used them to
prepare articles published in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal
of Cold War Studies.
As experienced researchers with extensive knowledge of the topics on
which they wrote, these specialists (Max Holland, Eduard Mark, John
Fox, Gregg Herken, and Steve Usdin) would easily have spotted
evidence of forgery, or some evidence of inconsistencies that would
have raised questions about the notebooks’ provenance.
But they did not, and they, too, have linked their professional
standing to a judgment that the notebooks are authentic. So too
has the Journal of
Cold War Studies and
its chief editor, Mark Kramer, director of the Harvard Project for
Cold War Studies. Kramer, easily the leading authority in the
scholarly world on the Soviet-era archives, provides an editorial
note in the June issue discussing his interrogation of Vassiliev in
2006 over the provenance of the notebooks and the reasons for his
positive assessment of their authenticity. All of this Knight
hides from TLS
readers.

At first Knight insinuates that
Vassiliev’s notebooks are fakes, doubting that he could have
shipped them from Russia. As usual, she has no evidence.
She also finds that his production of 1,115 pages of transcriptions
and summary chapters over a two-year period "strains
credulity." Perhaps Ms. Knight writes very slowly but if
Vassiliev worked on the project for as few as four days a week for
forty weeks, he would have to take only about four pages of notes a
day to fill up his notebooks. Hardly Stakhanovinite labor!
Yet, after making these insinuations, Knight then agrees “that
the notes were taken from authentic SVR archival files.” (SVR
being the Russian successor to the First Main Directorate of the
KGB.) She goes on to assert, without presenting any evidence,
that Vassiliev’s summaries have “lots of omissions.”
Since summaries, by definition, leave out some details, and since
Knight has no idea of what was omitted, she might have the decency to
acknowledge that comparing Vassiliev’s summaries to the
complete copies of some documents that have been released by the SVR
indicates that he made very careful and pertinent summaries.

But Knight is apparently
incapable of reading English very carefully. She claims, “the
entire documentation for Spies
comes from Vassiliev.” His notebooks are certainly our
chief source, but we go to great lengths to integrate information
from the several thousand deciphered KGB cables of the NSA’s
Venona project, scores of FBI investigatory files, the detailed
information provided by the American diplomat and KGB agent
Noel Field to Hungarian Communist security officers in the 1950s
regarding his work with his fellow spy Alger Hiss in the mid-1930s,
court and congressional hearing testimony by former Soviet spies such
as Whittaker Chambers, as well as British MI5 reports on suspected
Soviet spies in the British atomic program and British
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) decoding of Communist
International messages.

The deciphered Venona messages
released in the mid-1990s referred to a Soviet source on the atomic
facilities at Oak Ridge, code name “Persian,” but the
messages did not indicate the real name behind the cover name.
Spies
provides the real name, Russell McNutt. Knight airily dismisses
this information: “Why does it matter?” Most
historians (Knight excepted) care about historical details. She
also neglects to tell TLS
readers that it was Julius Rosenberg who recruited McNutt, a datum of
more than passing interest to anyone who knows anything about the
controversy over his activities on behalf of the KGB.

On two personal notes, Knight
belittles our knowledge of archival matters. One of us is
employed full time as a historian/archivist acquiring new documentary
collections for the Library of Congress. We were the first
American historians to have access to the records of the Communist
International and the American Communist Party after the collapse of
the USSR and authored two volumes of Yale University Press’s
documentary series, the Annals of Communism. One of us, John
Haynes, initiated the successful project to microfilm the American
Communist Party’s records, long hidden in a Moscow archive, and
make its 435,000 pages of invaluable historical record available
without restriction at a half-dozen American research institutions.
Haynes was also the American historical advisor to the International
Committee to Computerize the Comintern Archive, a project that
resulted in the digitization of over one-million pages of Communist
International records that are now available at European and American
research institutions. In contrast, Amy Knight has never edited
a published collection of archival documents.

Knight also implies that
Vassiliev was motivated by greed for money. If that were his
chief motive, then his decision to associate with us makes no sense
at all. Our books (fifteen in total) are largely published by
university presses that require peer review of manuscripts and they
are notoriously cheap with advances and royalties. Further,
Vassiliev gave, not sold, his notebooks to the Library of Congress
and agreed to make the scans, transcriptions, and translations freely
available to anyone without charge. Interested readers can
consult and download the material on which our book is based on line
at www.cwihp.org. Historians and researchers all over the
world have already downloaded hundreds of copies of the notebooks.
We are entirely confident that they will find them, as we have, a
rich and invaluable resource for understanding Soviet intelligence in
the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.